What is the basic meaning of cloud computing?

 What is the basic meaning of cloud computing?

What is cloud computing? Cloud computing is on-demand access over the Internet to computing resources—applications, servers (physical servers and virtual servers), data storage, development tools, network functions, and more—hosted in a remote data center managed by cloud services. provider (or CSP).

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is on-demand access over the Internet to computing resources—applications, servers (physical servers and virtual servers), data storage, development tools, network functions, and more—hosted in a remote data center managed by cloud services. provider (or CSP). The CSP makes these resources available for a monthly subscription or charges on a per-use basis.

Compared to traditional on-premise IT and depending on the cloud services chosen, cloud computing helps to do the following:

Lower IT costs: The cloud allows you to reduce some or most of the cost and effort of purchasing, installing, configuring and managing your own on-premise infrastructure.

Improve agility and save time: With the cloud, your organization can start using business applications in minutes, instead of waiting weeks or months for IT to respond to a request, purchase and configure supporting hardware, and install software. The cloud also allows certain users — specifically developers and data scientists — to help themselves with software and support infrastructure.

Easier and more cost-effective scaling: The cloud provides elasticity – instead of buying excess capacity that goes unused during slow periods, you can increase and decrease capacity in response to traffic peaks and troughs. You can also leverage your cloud provider's global network to extend your applications closer to users around the world.

The term "cloud computing" also refers to the technology that makes the cloud work. This includes some form of virtualized IT infrastructure—servers, operating system software, networks, and other infrastructure that is abstracted using special software so that it can be pooled and distributed regardless of physical hardware boundaries. For example, one hardware server can be divided into multiple virtual servers.

Virtualization allows cloud providers to make the most of their data center resources. Unsurprisingly, many companies have adopted a cloud-based delivery model for their on-premise infrastructure so they can achieve maximum utilization and cost savings compared to traditional IT infrastructure and offer the same self-service and flexibility to their end users.

If you use a computer or mobile device at home or at work, you almost certainly use some form of cloud computing every day, whether it's a cloud-based application like Google Gmail or Salesforce, streaming media like Netflix, or cloud file storage like Dropbox. Industry analyst Gartner recently projected that global end-user public cloud spending will reach nearly $600 billion by 2023 (link is external to ibm.com).

Cloud computing services

IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) are the three most common cloud service models, and it is not uncommon for organizations to use all three.

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)

SaaS—also known as cloud software or cloud applications—is application software that is hosted in the cloud and accessed by users through a web browser, a dedicated desktop client, or an API that integrates with a desktop operating system or mobile device. In most cases, SaaS users pay a monthly or annual subscription fee; some may offer "pay-as-you-go" pricing based on your actual usage.

In addition to the cost savings, utility and scalability of the cloud, SaaS offers the following:

Automatic upgrades: Thanks to SaaS, users can enjoy new features as soon as the provider adds them without having to organize an on-premise upgrade.

Data loss protection: Because SaaS stores application data in the cloud with the application, users won't lose data if their device fails or breaks.

SaaS is the primary delivery model for most commercial software today – there are hundreds of thousands of SaaS solutions available, from the most focused industrial and departmental applications to powerful enterprise software database and AI (artificial intelligence) software.

PaaS (Platform as a Service)

PaaS provides software developers with an on-demand platform—hardware, a complete software suite, infrastructure, and even development tools—to run, develop, and manage applications without the cost, complexity, and inflexibility of maintaining that platform on-premises.

With PaaS, the cloud provider hosts everything—servers, networks, storage, operating system software, middleware, databases—in its data center. Developers simply choose from the menu to "spin up" the servers and environments they need to run, build, test, deploy, maintain, update and scale applications.

Today, PaaS is often built on containers, a virtualized computing model that is one step removed from virtual servers. Containers virtualize the operating system and allow developers to package an application with only the operating system services it needs to run on any platform, without modification and without the need for middleware.

Red Hat OpenShift is a popular PaaS built on Docker and Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration solution that automates deployment, scaling, load balancing and more for container-based applications.

IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service)

IaaS provides on-demand access to essential computing resources—physical and virtual servers, networks, and storage—over the Internet on a pay-as-you-go basis. IaaS allows end-users to scale up and down resources as needed, reducing the need for high initial capital expenditures or unnecessary on-premise or "proprietary" infrastructure and over-purchasing resources to accommodate periodic peaks in usage.

Unlike SaaS and PaaS (and even newer PaaS computing models such as containers and serverless), IaaS gives users the lowest level of control over computing resources in the cloud.

IaaS was the most popular cloud computing model when it emerged in early 2010. While it remains the cloud model for many types of workloads, the use of SaaS and PaaS is growing much faster.